How a Misfit Group of Computer Geeks and English Majors Transformed Wall Street

In celebration of New York Magazine’s 50th anniversary, this series, which will continue through October 2018, tells the stories behind key moments that shaped the city’s culture.

In the summer of 1988, the hedge-fund manager Donald Sussman took a call from a former Columbia University computer-science professor wanting advice on his new Wall Street career.

“I’d like to come see you,” David Shaw, then 37 years old, told Sussman. Shaw had grown up in California, receiving a Ph.D. at Stanford University, then moved to New York to teach at Columbia before joining investment bank Morgan Stanley, which had a new secretive trading group that was using computer modeling. A neophyte in the ways of Wall Street, Shaw wanted Sussman, who founded the investment firm Paloma Partners, to look at an offer he had received from Morgan Stanley’s rival, Goldman Sachs.

Sussman’s career has been built on recognizing and financing hedge-fund talent, but he had never encountered anyone like David Shaw. The cerebral computer scientist would go on to become a pioneer in a revolution in finance that would computerize the industry, turn long-standing practices on their head, and replace a culture of tough-guy traders with brainy eccentrics — not just math and science geeks, but musicians and writers — wearing jeans and T-shirts.

A harbinger of the techies who would storm Wall Street in a decade, this new generation of hedge-fund introverts would replace the profanity-laced trading rooms of the 1980s with quiet libraries of algorithmic research in every corner of the markets. They would also launch an early email system and look into the prospect of online retailing, leading one of Shaw’s most ambitious employees to take the idea and run with it. Yes, the seeds of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon were planted at a New York City hedge fund.

Thirty years ago, all of that was yet to come. All Shaw told Sussman at the time was, “I think I can use technology to trade securities.”

Sussman told Shaw the Goldman offer he had received was inadequate. “If you’re confident this idea is going to work, you should come work for me,” Sussman told Shaw. The offer led to three days of sailing in Long Island Sound on Sussman’s 45-foot sloop with the financier, Shaw, and his partner, Peter Laventhol. The two men —without disclosing many details — “convinced me they believed they could generate models that would identify portfolios that would be market-neutral and able to outperform others,” Sussman remembers. In lay terms, the strategy would make a lot of money without taking much risk.

Hedge funds were still fairly primitive, and while they were already using mathematical formulas to capture small price disparities in such esoteric instruments as convertible bonds — then a dominant hedge-fund strategy — Shaw was planning to take the math to a whole new level.

Paloma Partners agreed to invest $30 million with D.E. Shaw. Since then, the company has grown into an estimated $47 billion firm, earning its investors more than $25 billion — as of the end of 2016, tied for the third biggest haul ever. It has made millionaires out of scores of employees and a multibillionaire out of Shaw, who stepped back in 2001 from day-to-day operation of the firm to start D.E. Shaw Research, which conducts computational biochemistry research in an effort to help cure cancer and other diseases. Shaw is estimated by Forbes to be worth $5.5 billion, and remains as elusive as ever: He declined to speak to New York for this article.

Meanwhile, the quantitative revolution D.E. Shaw helped spawn has become the biggest trend in hedge funds today, capturing some $500 billion of the industry’s more than $3 trillion in assets and dominating the top tier. Seven out of the top ten largest funds are considered “quants,” including D.E. Shaw itself. One of those seven quants, Two Sigma, was started by D.E. Shaw veterans. But the changes D.E. Shaw wrought haven’t just been felt in hedge funds. Shaw spit out orders accounting for an estimated 2 percent of the trading volume of the New York Stock Exchange in its early years, and thanks to it and other emerging quants, the NYSE was forced to automate. By the end of the 1990s, electronic stock exchanges were driving trading prices down, and by 2001, stocks began to be traded in penny increments, instead of eighths. These changes made it cheaper and easier for all investors to get into the game, leading to an explosion in trading volume.

From the beginning, D.E. Shaw was a quirky enterprise, even for a hedge fund. The first office was far from Wall Street, in a loftlike space above Revolution Books, a communist bookstore on 16th Street, in what was then a still fairly seedy Union Square. The office, about 1,200 square feet, was bare, with freshly painted walls and a tin ceiling. But it boasted two Sun Microsystem computers — the fastest, most sophisticated computers then in vogue on Wall Street. “He needed Ferraris; we bought him Ferraris,” says Sussman.

As Shaw sought to build his newfangled firm, he didn’t want to hire people steeped in Wall Street’s ways. Likewise, those who joined D.E. Shaw typically disdained the notion of working on the Street. “I thought to myself, No way,” says Lou Salkind, remembering a call he received from Shaw in the summer of 1988 asking him if he would be interested in joining his start-up. Salkind was finishing his Ph.D. in computer science at New York University and on the hunt for a job, but Wall Street turned him off. “The year before, I’d been recruited by a few firms on Wall Street. I was skeptical I would like anything in finance.”

Lacking any other job offers, he agreed to meet with Shaw. After all, his hedge fund’s office was about ten blocks away from NYU. The two men went to lunch at nearby Union Square Cafe, where they got to talking about gambling, one of Salkind’s passions. Born in New York City, Salkind had learned to count cards at an early age and developed a horse-betting system at age 13. He had no idea such mathematical skills would come in handy at a hedge fund. “I had a blast,” he recalls.

When they returned to the office, Shaw began laying out his vision. “What I want to build here is a company at the intersection of technology and finance,” he told Salkind. As with Sussman, Shaw wouldn’t tell Salkind much more than that, but he did speculate that his firm might be able to replace Wall Street market makers: “They prepare to buy at the bid, hold, and sell at a higher price. The difference is what you try to capture. We could do a lot of this stuff automatically with computers,” he told the fellow computer scientist.

“Oh, you’re like a bookie. That’s the vig,” said Salkind, who was immediately sold on the job. Salkind, who retired in 2014, became one of the first employees of D.E. Shaw.

In the hedge fund’s early days, Sussman would visit the office weekly. “Once they started trading, they started making money out of the box,” he remembers. “These were very serious folks. I used to go and sit next to them watching them trade. They didn’t miss a goddamn thing,” he recalls. “The atmosphere of the place was unlike any other investment firm. It was like going into the research room in the Library of Congress.”

In 1990, Anne Dinning, another NYU computer-science Ph.D. who knew Salkind from his days there, struck up a conversation with Shaw at a party at Salkind’s home. “I didn’t even know what a hedge fund was,” she recalls, but agreed to interview for a job at Shaw “as a lark,” and ended up joining, despite her initial desire to become an academic.

“My first job was to work on some forecast of Japanese equities,” she says. Dinning didn’t have to know anything about the companies or the Japanese stock market. The computer would figure it all out. In the early days, she would run 24-hour simulations, waking up every six hours in the night to check on their progress. Once the algorithms were ready for live trading, “I’d look at the P&L every day and see if it’s doing what I thought it would. It was like an experiment. And I could see the immediate results,” says Dinning. As the firm expanded, Dinning ended up running both the London and Tokyo offices of D.E. Shaw, and both she and Salkind became members of an unorthodox six-person executive committee that ran the firm in a surprisingly effective consensus manner after Shaw stepped back from its day-to-day management. (He is still involved in strategic decisions.)

While D.E. Shaw was minting money, David Shaw’s vision didn’t stop with creating a quantitative hedge fund. Technology, he knew, had the capacity to transform our everyday lives. As an academic, Shaw had already used the Arpanet, the precursor to the internet, to communicate with other scientists. That helped inspire one of the first free internet-based email systems, Juno. With equity capital from D.E. Shaw, the service launched in 1996, went public, and eventually merged with a competitor.

Free email was only one of Shaw’s early initiatives, explains Charles Ardai, who joined Shaw in 1991 with a degree in English (specifically, British Romantic poetry) from Columbia, one of the first of many unconventional hires who didn’t have a background in the hard sciences.

“He went to one of my co-workers and said, ‘I think people will buy things on the internet. They’re going to shop on the internet. What’s more, they’re not just going to shop.’ This, I swear to you, is what David said: ‘Not only will people shop, but when they buy something — let’s say they buy a pipe for watering their garden — they’re going to try a pipe, and they’re going to say, this pipe is good, or this pipe is bad, and they’re going to post reviews, and other people will see them and pick the right instead of the wrong pipe, because somebody else told them, I like this pipe. I don’t like that pipe.’”

Jeff Bezos, who had joined in 1990, was in charge of the online retailing project at D.E. Shaw. He became so enthused about the possibilities that he asked Shaw if he could take the idea and run with it on his own. Shaw agreed, and Amazon was soon born. (Shaw didn’t take a stake in the now-$620 billion company.)

Upon graduating from Columbia, Ardai says he had been so surprised to receive a letter from Shaw asking him to apply for a job that he thought “it must be a scam.” Soon after the 22-year-old joined, he was tasked with setting up Shaw’s recruiting department. “We’ve filled the company with everything from a chess master, to published writers, to stand-up comedians — people who really excel in one field or another — we had an Olympic-caliber fencer, and at one point we had a demolitions expert,” he says. One of D.E. Shaw’s best traders had tattoos all over his arms and couldn’t get hired anywhere on Wall Street. Another was a trombone player who eventually left to create a music program in the Bronx. (Ardai also has other interests; he is the founder and editor of Hard Case Crime, a line of pulp-style paperback crime novels.)

D.E. Shaw’s hiring process may have a far-flung reach, but by no means is it egalitarian. In fact, its recruiting letters once started with an assertion that the firm is “unapologetically elitist.” Once eyebrow-raising, the hedge fund’s hiring practices are no longer abnormal, as they have been adopted by giant tech firms like Google, and of course, Amazon, which even uses the same grading system as D.E. Shaw when interviewing candidates.

The casual dress code embraced by D.E. Shaw has also become de rigueur at tech giants. Though viewed as shocking in Shaw’s early years, such attire is also common at many New York hedge funds today. “One of the goals at D.E. Shaw has always been ‘let’s remove all of the unnecessary constraints,’ for example, why require people to wear neckties?” explains Ardai. The crew at D.E. Shaw was so disheveled that, according to Shaw lore, one disgusted white-shoe law firm moved out of a midtown office tower that the hedge fund occupied — in protest. These days, David Shaw, whose research project is housed across the street from the hedge fund, is often seen wearing a black T-shirt and cargo shorts — even in the middle of winter.

For all of its attempts at modesty, D.E. Shaw has come a ways from its years above a communist bookstore. With more than 1,000 employees, in 2010 the firm moved into new offices at 1166 Sixth Avenue (its fourth New York City home) whose austere reception area has a ceiling and walls covered with screens designed to look like computer punch cards.

In 2015, former Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt, a longtime investor in D.E. Shaw’s hedge funds, took a 20 percent stake in the firm, buying out bankrupt Lehman Brothers’ earlier investment. These days, there’s so much money chasing quants that the earlier strategy of betting on inefficiencies in public equity markets has become less profitable. Innovator D.E. Shaw has moved from its beginnings in equity arbitrage into other arenas like distressed debt and emerging markets, where it uses its quantitative techniques to help give it an edge while relying on humans, not computer models, to make trading decisions.

As the firm gets ready to celebrate its 30th anniversary, David Shaw has not disappointed his first investor, Donald Sussman, whose firm eventually had hundreds of millions of dollars invested with D.E. Shaw. “I never doubted him for a minute,” he says. “I never envisioned that D.E. Shaw would be $47 billion, but I did envision how David would change the world of finance.”

President Donald Trump’s social media accounts are filled with vile racism, idiotic xenophobia, and inaccurate statistics. And now we can add another category to the list: fake photos.

In recent months, Trump’s official Facebook and Instagram accounts have published photos of the president that have been manipulated to make him look thinner. If it only happened once you might be able to chalk it up as an accident. But Gizmodo has discovered at least three different retouched photos on President Trump’s social media pages that have been published since October of 2018.

The number of U.S. airport screeners who took unscheduled absences rose to 10 percent on Sunday, more than triple that of a year ago as the stalemate over the government shutdown continued over a holiday weekend, according to the Transportation Security Administration.

The number of unscheduled TSA absences hit the highest level seen so far, the TSA said in a statement Monday as the shutdown entered its 31st day. A year ago the absence rate was 3.1 percent.

Chris Christie goes after the “riffraff” in the Trump administration in a new excerpt from his memoir — Let Me Finish

Instead of high-quality, vetted appointees for key administration posts, he got the Russian lackey and future federal felon Michael Flynn as national security adviser. He got the greedy and inexperienced Scott Pruitt as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

He got the high-flying Tom Price as health and human services secretary. He got the not-ready-for-prime-time Jeff Sessions as attorney general, promptly recusing himself from the Justice Department’s Russian-collusion probe. He got a stranger named Rex Tillerson as secretary of state. …

He got the Apprentice show loser Omarosa Manigault in whatever Omarosa’s job purported to be. (I never could figure that one out.) … Too few Kellyanne Conways. A boatload of Sebastian Gorkas. Too few Steven Mnuchins.

Bloomberg speech at @NationalAction DC breakfast a concerted effort to prove his life has focused on issues important African-American community, touching on education, environmental justice, lessons from father, and - above all - gun violence

Oxfam said the wealth of more than 2,200 billionaires across the globe had increased by $900bn in 2018 – or $2.5bn a day. The 12% increase in the wealth of the very richest contrasted with a fall of 11% in the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population.

As a result, the report concluded, the number of billionaires owning as much wealth as half the world’s population fell from 43 in 2017 to 26 last year. In 2016 the number was 61.

Senator Kamala Harris, the California Democrat and barrier-breaking prosecutor who became the second black woman to serve in the United States Senate, declared her candidacy for president on Monday, joining an increasingly crowded and diverse field in what promises to be a wide-open nomination process.

The announcement was bathed in symbolism: Ms. Harris chose to enter the race on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, an overt nod to the historic nature of her candidacy, and her timing was also meant to evoke Shirley Chisholm, the New York congresswoman who became the first woman to seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for president 47 years ago this week.

More details and context regarding Friday’s confrontation between a Native American drummer and Catholic school teens in D.C.

Nathan Phillips said in an interview with The Associated Press that he was trying to keep peace between some Kentucky high school students and a black religious group that was also on the National Mall on Friday. The students were participating in the March for Life, which drew thousands of anti-abortion protesters, and Phillips was attending the Indigenous Peoples March happening the same day.

“Something caused me to put myself between (them) — it was black and white,” said Phillips, who lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan. “What I saw was my country being torn apart. I couldn’t stand by and let that happen.”

Videos show a youth standing very close to Phillips and staring at him as he sang and played the drum. Other students — some in “Make America Great Again” hats and sweatshirts — were chanting, laughing and jeering. Other videos also showed members of the religious group, who appear to be affiliated with the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, yelling disparaging and profane insults at the students, who taunt them in return. Video also shows the Native Americans being insulted by the small religious group as well. …

In a joint statement , the Roman Catholic Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School apologized and said they are investigating and will take “appropriate action, up to and including expulsion. … We extend our deepest apologies to Mr. Phillips … This behavior is opposed to the Church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person.”

Sign of the times, 30 days into the longest government shutdown in American history

GoFundMe starts its own effort to assist federal workers hit by the shutdown. Employees of world’s most powerful nation “are being forced to work without pay and line up at diaper or food banks,” said GoFundMe CEO Rob Solomon. “It makes no sense.” https://t.co/aQDYv0EmwZ

Cohen’s lie about the timeline of a project regarding a big skyscraper with Trump’s name on it didn’t catch Donald Trump’s attention, according to Giuliani

Mr. Giuliani said that when Mr. Cohen testified to Congress that the project had ended in January 2016, Mr. Trump simply “accepted” that answer.

“The president couldn’t tell you the exact day it started and the exact day it ended; he remembers it started and he remembers it ended,” Mr. Giuliani said, but nothing more. “It never got to anything concrete.”

“We’re being told to stand our ground. Our reporting is going to be borne out to be accurate, and we’re 100% behind it,” [Cormier explained to host Brian Stelter]. … [The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist], who wouldn’t reveal his sources when asked, said the story had been in the works for months and went through a “rigorous” vetting process. The story was reviewed by at least three editors, Smith said. …

Smith said BuzzFeed is “eager” to understand which parts of the report Mueller’s office is challenging as inaccurate. He said BuzzFeed reporter Jason Leopold, who coauthored the story, submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for details on how the statement from Mueller’s office was constructed. …

Journalist Carl Bernstein, a CNN political analyst, told Stelter on Sunday that he thought it was “going to take time before we fully understand what the exact truth is here.”

An intentionally misrepresented solution to an intentionally misrepresented crisis

A Republican senator who encouraged President Donald Trump to pursue a compromise with congressional Democrats to end the partial government shutdown described the White House’s offer this weekend as “a straw man proposal” that is not intended to become law.

“What I encouraged the White House to do and multiple others encouraged the White House to do is put out a proposal,” Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) said Sunday during an interview with host Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week.”

“They’ve listened to a lot of Democrat and Republican members for the last month. They’ve heard all the demands, they know all the background on it,” said Lankford, a member of the Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

“Put out a straw man proposal. Get something out there the president can say, ‘I can support this’ — and has elements from both sides. Put it on the table, then open it up for debate.”

Rudy Giuliani was “defending” the president on the Sunday morning shows again this week, and it’s gone about as well as you’d expect.

On CNN”s State of the Union, Giuliani said, “As far as I know, President Trump did not have discussions with [Michael Cohen about his Congressional testimony] — Certainly no discussions with him in which he told him or counseled him to lie.” But he also acknowledged, “I don’t know if it happened or it didn’t happen… I have no knowledge if he spoke to him,” before adding, “And so what if he talked to him about it?”

“If he had any discussions with him, they’d be about the version of the events that Michael Cohen gave them which they all believe was true,” Giuliani also explained, and angrily accused host Jake Tapper of having “hysteria” after Tapper said he wanted to learn the truth about the Cohen-Trump interactions. “You should all be careful,” Giuliani said.

On Meet the Press, Giuliani was “100 percent certain” that Trump did not ask Cohen to lie.

“I can tell you his counsel to Michael Cohen throughout that entire period was, ‘Tell the truth,’ he added. “We thought he was telling the truth. I still believe he may have been telling the truth when he testified before Congress,”

Giuliani also admitted on MTP that Trump’s discussions about building a Trump Tower in Moscow went on “throughout 2016”, and possibly even into November — even though Trump said then and later that he had no business with Russia.

“It’s our understanding that [the Trump Tower Moscow talks] went on throughout 2016, not a lot of them, but there were conversations, can’t be sure of the exact date. … Probably up to — could be up to as far as October, November.”

1) Threatened to hunt down and deport DACA recipients if Democrats don’t accept his offer to temporarily cancel his cancellation of DACA, while also assuring the (pissed-off) far right that the deal doesn’t include amnesty, while also suggesting full amnesty would be an option sometime later, if he gets what he wants.

2) Used the severe winter weather striking much of the U.S. to make fun of climate change (which is causing more severe weather, year-round).

4) Made another effort to dominate Pelosi in response to her cancellation of his State of the Union speech, insisting he has “so many options” which include “doing it as per your written offer (made during the Shutdown, security is no problem), and my written acceptance,” whatever that is supposed to mean.

More comments from the Native American elder who was harassed by MAGA-clad teens on Friday in D.C.

[64-year-old Nathan] Phillips, who was singing the American Indian Movement song that serves as a ceremony to send the spirits home, said he noticed tensions beginning to escalate when the teens and other apparent participants from the nearby March for Life rally began taunting the dispersing indigenous crowd. …

“It was getting ugly, and I was thinking: ‘I’ve got to find myself an exit out of this situation and finish my song at the Lincoln Memorial,’ ” Phillips recalled. “I started going that way, and that guy in the hat stood in my way and we were at an impasse. He just blocked my way and wouldn’t allow me to retreat.”

So, he kept drumming and singing, thinking about his wife, Shoshana, who died of bone marrow cancer nearly four years ago, and the various threats that face indigenous communities around the world, he said.

“I felt like the spirit was talking through me,” Phillips said. …

Phillips, an Omaha tribe elder who fought in the Vietnam War and now lives in Michigan, has long been active in the indigenous rights movement. A co-founder of the Native Youth Alliance cultural and education group, he shows up to Arlington National Cemetery every Veterans Day with a peace pipe to pay tribute to Native Americans who served in the U.S. military.

Photo: "Ghadir Taher, 27, an interpreter who worked for a U.S. defense contractor, was the 4th American killed in the suicide bombing attack in Syria this week. She was born and raised in Damascus and immigrated to the US in 2001, eventually becoming a naturalized citizen." - CNN's Jake Tapper

1/19/2019

Another reason why Trump’s deal carries little weight

One big development in the last 24 hours was the Supreme Court deciding not to take the DACA case. Trump has said he was waiting for the court to uphold his decision to terminate DACA. Now, looks like that leverage gone until at least summer, 2020.

Democrats were hopeful that the president was finally willing to reopen government and proceed with a much-need discussion to protect the border. Unfortunately, initial reports make clear that his proposal is a compilation of several previously rejected initiatives, each of which is unacceptable and in total, do not represent a good faith effort to restore certainty to people’s lives. It is unlikely that any one of these provisions alone would pass the House, and taken together, they are a non-starter.

The stuff Trump is talking about right now is pretty much verbatim the stuff offered in the last version of a proposal, sent as a letter 2 weeks ago, plus a legislative extension of existing DACA and TPS protections.

McConnell, who has said repeatedly only bills with support of Trump and Democrats can end shutdown, says he will hold vote on Trump proposal — even though Dems are rejecting it. “Everyone has made their point—now it’s time to make a law. I intend to move to this legislation this week”

Trump’s “asylum reforms” riff is code for denying due process for unaccompanied minors and eviscerating [the] Flores Settlement. Means that kids who now get protection will get sent back to face death and kids will be detained for as long as Trump wants.

Isn’t this a kind of hostage-taking squared? First end the programs. Then shut the government. Then promise to temporarily restore the programs you’ve ended & reopen the government you have closed, in return for the ransom of money for a wall that 55-60% of country consistently opposes?

[I’m told] there’s increasing nervousness inside the White House that Trump’s gambit will fail with Dems, which seems clear at this point — but also that it will hurt him with his base, which has supported him thru shutdown.

The pile-on begins and it’s not just from Dems. NumbersUSA head Roy Beck calls Trump’s proposal “a loser for the forgotten American workers who were central to his campaign promises.”

The last time Trump faced intense criticism from the immigration hawks in his base — when he was prepared to sign a clean CR — he did a 180 & triggered the shutdown. Its hard to picture him backing away a 2nd time (no guarantee he will) without jeopardizing their support.

[White House Chief of Staff] Mick Mulvaney is blaming Democrats if [federal workers] don’t get paid next week: “If the bill is filibustered on Tuesday, and we do not get a motion to proceed, people will not get paid. I will be very curious to see how the Democrats — especially in the Senate — choose to deal w/ this piece of legislation.”

Mr. Trump is scheduled to make his announcement [on Saturday] at 4 pm. Aides cautioned that the announcement has already been delayed once by an hour, and that the president may still change his approach.

The offer to codify protections for young immigrants brought to the U. S. as children, known as Dreamers, is seen as a major concession inside the White House.

“Dems were not consulted on this and have rejected similar overtures previously.”

“Similar inadequate offers from the Administration were already rejected by Democrats.”

“The BRIDGE Act does not fully protect Dreamers and is not a permanent solution.””This is not a compromise as it includes the same wasteful, ineffective $5.7 billion wall demand that shut down the government in the first place.”

“This cannot pass the House or Senate.””The President must agree to re-open government and join Democrats to negotiate on border security measures that work and not an expensive and ineffective wall that the President promised Mexico would pay for.”

Democrats have been under pressure from immigrant rights organizations not to give Trump funding for a wall. And Trump’s offer would not provide a path to permanent legal status — or citizenship — that many Democrats have sought in any immigration deal that would dramatically ramp up border security measures. …

Trump also could face blowback from conservatives, including prominent commentators, who have opposed any attempts to extend deportation protections from undocumented immigrants.

[A]fter Pelosi’s letter, the source said, it became clear to McConnell she was “never going to get off her position and some other spark needed to happen.” McConnell told the president that it was his view that Pelosi was never going to move. She would and could not negotiate on border funding because of her caucus, and Trump needed to be the one to put something forward he would sign so that McConnell would have the presidential backing to bring it to the floor.

McConnell also encouraged Trump to make the offer tantalizing to Democrats; it couldn’t be something that only Trump would sign and Republicans would support, but something that could win over some Democrats. The Pence-Kushner-McConnell meeting on Thursday night solidified the plan. McConnell did not try to write the bill for them; this bill is the culmination of Kushner and Pence’s conversations with some Democrats and an inventory of proposals they discussed. Democratic whip Dick Durbin is Kushner’s closest Democratic ally in the Senate after they worked together on criminal justice reform, according to White House officials.